Chronobiology
Author: Leandro Pablo Casiraghi Casiraghi | email: lcasiraghi@udesa.edu.ar
Leandro Casiraghi 1°, Diego Golombek 1°, Horacio de la Iglesia 2°, Ignacio Spiousas 1°
1° Laboratorio Interdisciplinario del Tiempo y la Experiencia (LITERA), Escuela de Educación, Universidad de San Andrés
2° Department of Biology, University of Washington
The timing of sleep in humans is shaped by many different factors, the most important being the homeostatic drive for sleep (i.e. the more we stay awake, the more we feel we need to sleep; process S) and the circadian drive (the time our body clock says its best to sleep; process C). These are the elements of the so-called two-process model of sleep regulation, which has proven useful for studying sleep dynamics. According to it, the combination of the S and C signals determine the times of the start and end of sleep periods, and one can manipulate each process features (e.g. relative weight, amplitude, etc.) to predict sleep times under different physiological and environmental conditions. Recently, we reported the occurrence of a modulation of sleep times in real-life settings that follows the lunar cycle. The mechanism(s) through which such changes in sleep are mediated are still unknown, and the prevalence of this effect in hyper-industrialized populations suggests that it may not be simply mediated by moonlight. Here we add an input with a lunar period to features within the S and C processes in the model and use it to predict sleep times. We compare these results to field recorded data to test candidate pathways of how a lunar-like signal could be affecting sleep. We also propose specific experiments to test these predictions, and describe the currently planned field and sleep lab studies in the project.